Sometimes you can like a movie for entertainment value but still not find it to be an excellent film. That is the case with Girl, Interrupted. As far as being entertained for 2 hours--yes I was. I enjoyed the time I spent watching this movie and it made me want to both laugh and cry.
There were some parts of it I really could identify with and it made me think. I suppose that for the most part those are the qualities that make a movie "good". However, it did not move out of the "good" range for me based on what seemed to be an inconsistent theme.
I really felt like they never decided themselves what the point of this movie was going to be about. Was she insane or was she not? Apparently the people who made this movie did not know themselves. Since I hear it is based on a book I suppose I will go out and read that myself. Perhaps then I will get a truer sense of what it was about.
Winona Ryder plays a young girl who apparently attempts suicide and winds up in a psychiatric hospital for the children of the upper class. At first she denies intending to kill herself but later admits she did. That was no surprise since she had already spoken about her fascination with death in an earlier flashback.
There are two kinds of fascination with death. One is suicidal and neurotic. The other is very normal. Every single person who lives on this planet has to think about death at some point. Where will you go when you die? What happens when you die? How do you come to terms with the idea of dying? This is humankind.
If you ask me her fascination with it was more on this level not so much in a neurotic way. Now if you saw her in the movie Beetlejuice you saw a character truly fascinated with death. She walked around in black and looked like the walking dead. Not so in this movie.
Instead all we really see is a girl whose parents want her to go to college and because she would rather work on her writing they make her life a living hell..probably to the point that she is frustrated enough to for a moment actually think about suicide. There is a huge difference though between people who are neurotic, fascinated with death and out to harm themselves and a teenager whose parents pressure her to the point of breaking her down.
They reiterate several times in this movie two things. The first is that she does not have a desire to attend college (..Ok lock her up right now! That has to spell crazy...don't think so!) The second is that she wants to be a writer. Anytime she mentions that people look away. In fact it is almost as if they consider that to be a statement indicative of psychosis.
This movie starts out with this girl, Susannah, recognizing that she and her parents differ in what she wants for her life. They view it as rebellion. She views it as her asserting her own opinion. As a result they decide that she must have a mental disease because otherwise she would simply do what they wanted. We have all known someone who had parents like this. Perhaps they were our own.
As the movie goes on it seems that Susannah starts to refer to herself as sick and talks about the "disease" she has. In the beginning when they diagnose her as having a "borderline" personlity she finds it absurd. She suddenly has a mental disease merely because she doesn't want to go to college? But by the middle of the movie she has bought into this hook, line and sinker it appears.
I thought this was going to be a plot within the plot. They convinced her that she was crazy and now they are going to reprogram her. I expected her to suddenly have a grand awakening where she again realizes that they are the crazy ones not her but that never happened.
The basic conclusion of the movie seems to be that once she started participating in the program rather than resisting it she got "well." It appears that they even want us to believe that the hospital is not the bad guy at all. That they are out to help her.
The only problem with this is that throughout the entire movie they shove drugs down the girls throats like it was Pez. Sleeping pills, laxatives etc. Trying to resist the drugs makes you a "problem". They line the girls up like it's cattle call for these medications whether they like it or not. If they wanted me to believe the hospital was really friend and not foe then they would have had to do away with those scenes.
I have to say that this movie left me feeling somewhat offended. I was rooting for her from the start hoping she would find the strength to stand up to her parents. I was hoping that she would have some great epiphany where she discovered that she wasn't crazy at all but just misunderstood by a couple of parents who were a bit too anxious to stick her in the psycho ward just because she did not want to attend Radcliffe.
Instead what we have here is something similar to an old movie I saw as a kid called "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." I will never forget the chilling end to that film. Everyone on earth had had their bodies replaced by these "pod" people. They were no longer themselves.
The one person who had resisted this the most in the film eventually succumbs to it and the last scene is seeing him walk by and realizing he is no longer himself but has been snatched as well. That is pretty much the way I felt about this movie. By the end she had been "snatched" up into believing that she was sick in the first place. I'm not saying this was the intent of the film but it was certainly the message related to me.
As a result I did not find it to be especially gripping in its message. I would have preferred to have seen her have a stand off with her parents about her desire to be a writer rather than attend college.
Ironically this movie is based on a true story written by this character in the film. So it appears she did become a writer after all. Perhaps if someone had just believed in her in the first place rather than pawning her off as a crazy person she wouldn't have wasted a year of her life in the psycho ward.
She did escape from the hospital at one point I would have liked to have seen her keep going rather than turning back. In the end the only lesson I learned was that you should be really careful how much you let your parents control your life. If they are as domineering as this couple you might just find yourself in a straight jacket. Apparently if that happens there is no way out but buy into their theories--at least that is what the moral of this story was.
After a botched suicide attempt, Susanna Kaysen checks herself into a renowned psychiatric hospital, where she meets a group of troubled young women i...More at HotMovieSale.com
Set in the changing world of the late 1960s, GIRL, INTERRUPTED is the searing true story of Susanna Kaysen (two-time Oscar nominee Winona Ryder), a yo...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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